In rural North Macedonia, a teenage boy falls in love with both dance music and a girl promised to someone else.
Review by Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Georgi M. Unkovski
Starring: Arif Jakup, Agush Agushev, Aksel Mehmet, Dora Akan Zlatanova
Music is magic. Listening to a pop song entails that your entire mood and being is elevated within three minutes: your outlook heightened, the world suffused with colour, with new ideas and fresh feeling popping along your synapses (at the moment I'm listening to Robyn's new one: a bubbly confection from the future, so addictive. She's done us again!). The best pop music is witchcraft, a spell incanted in 180 seconds of melody, rhythm and instant poetry. Music is in fact so incredible that it actually confused Charles Darwin, who couldn't understand how a phenomenon which had such emotional power did not transition into survival function: he literally could not credit it. Charles came round in the end though, writing in his late life biography that he wished he'd listened to more music, the poor old boring bastard. Imagine thinking that everything in life must be reduced to utility, and not pleasure. Never trust anyone who doesn't listen to music: what can they know about anything? (It is quite poetic that Jane Austen, an assured cataloguer of human emotion and foible, replaced Darwin on the old ten pound note: natural selection).
I'm no biologist, but I think that music not having a survival function ("it leads to no good," the turtle bothering naturalist pontificated) is a load of nonsense, too. I stand shoulder to shoulder with Indeep in 1982. Music has been a salvation, a balm, a vector to somewhere "else" for so many of us. The opening line of DJ Ahmet - Georgi M. Unkovski's sweet natured pean to the power of music to elevate, nourish and inspire - "she loved music" is perhaps an understatement when summarising the manifest ways in which music affects the teens of this film's rural village setting, a closed community spread across the mountainous plains of North Macedonia and in thrall to Yörük tradition.
We pick up with the titular Ahmet (Arif Jakup), a shepherd boy who, when not herding sheps, cares for his selective mute younger brother and negotiates the conservative, utilitarian attitudes of his widowed father. This is a hand to mouth, dawn to dust world: survival of the fittest, indeed. Music is a universally defining aspect of teenage development - wherein we forge our identity, process feelings, face the world - but for Ahmet his headphones are a vital release from the pastoral drudgery of his existence. We open in a classroom where he listens to brittle techno, the break beats jutting from his earphones causing him to throw shapes. In a neat joke the nonplussed teacher orders "Ahmet" to stand: several boys in the class do, the synonymous names wittily illustrating the limited parameters of this small province.
While Ahmet's ears are perked by music, his eyes are commandeered by the arrival of Aya (Dora Akan Zlatanova), a German teen returned to the village to be part of an arranged marriage. Her position mirrors the suppressions of Ahmet's home situation, and the two are drawn to each other with Aya maintaining that she will somehow slip out of her cultural obligations. Cinematographer Naum Doksevski frames Aya's entrance as slo-mo kaleidoscope of colour and anticipation, with Ahmet watching her walk across the crop fields and hearing the drama of Erkut Taçkın's Özlem in his head (the soundtrack is a blend of old and new, paralleling the film's themes of tradition and modernity). She turns and waves at him, the song abruptly halts, and Ahmet runs for it - overwhelmed and too shy to engage.
A crush ensues, and one night Ahmet follows Aya into the woods to happen upon a full on (and slightly implausible if I'm honest) illegal rave: lighting rigs, stage, neon. It blows Ahmet's mind! A joy of Unkovski's film is how it observes the different pleasures of listening to music: the crucial intimacy of headphone consumption, the unifying delight of communal experience. Problem is, Ahmet's sheep have duly followed their steer into the forests too and wigged out chaos ensues, resulting in viral footage of "DJ Ahmet" calamitously attempting to collect them and one sheep going missing-! As Ahmet's dad doesn't have Wi-Fi, let alone TikTok, the first isn't that much of a problem (indeed, it gets him closer to the fragrant Aya) but the latter most certainly is, with Ahmet made to sleep in amongst the animals until the wayward ovine returns.
The cruelty of Ahmet's treatment is very carefully measured, both by the naturalistic performances but also Unkovski's careful direction. The Yörük culture is one of strict convention and social hierarchies, which DJ Ahmet carefully represents. However, the degraded circumstances also allow Unkovski to overlay a Cinderella motif to his protagonist's arc: the boy sleeps in humble circumstances, wishes to go to the ball and dreams of a charmed princess. And it is music that is Ahmet's fairy godmother (in a synchronicity which surely supports the divine properties of pop, Gaga's evergreen Just Dance came on my shuffle: it could be the theme song of these kids), with the ugly stepsisters here patriarchal figures wedged in the past. The absurdity of the circumstances are highlighted when the lost sheep returns, spray painted pink at some point off screen by the loved-up revellers. You have to hand it to the colour pink: there is simply no other shade which is able to upset the bigoted and pious. But while the fuchsia ewe achieves instant diva status, it means more trouble for Ahmet who comically attempts to clean the slay off, further encapsulating his inhibited situation.
An important aspect of DJ Ahmet's charm is witnessing the indefatigability of its central character, as he cleans a sheep, delights to music, and falls in love. And what ultimately moves most about this lovely film is its portrayal of quiet courage, and the everyday beauty that people in far from ideal circumstances can locate. Most of this is due to Jakup's immensely likeable performance as Ahmet and the scale of emotions he deftly conveys. We reach a standoff where Ahmet, digging deep and relying on the charge of music, faces up to Aya's father. There is a convincing suggestion that music, with its insistent energy, is frightening to the patriarchy: like female sexuality, the gays, free thought; music is a marvel which is beyond their control. In the bittersweet triumph of its ending, however, DJ Ahmet demonstrates that while music's magic is powerful, like the Grimms' enchantments melting at midnight such aural sorcery has its real-life limits.
DJ Ahmet is in UK/ROI cinemas from March 27th.
